The Dig In Podcast w/Johnny Ova

What if the opening chapter of the Bible isn't telling you how God built the universe... but why he moved into it? Dr. John Walton has spent over four decades studying Genesis through the lens of ancient Near Eastern literature, and his conclusion has reshaped the way scholars, pastors, and Christians around the world read the creation account. In this conversation, Dr. Walton walks us through his...

The Bible didn't drop out of the sky. It was written by real people, in real places, surrounded by some of the most powerful civilizations the ancient world ever produced. Egypt. Babylon. Assyria. Their literature, their laws, their prayers, their creation stories. All of it was in the air when the authors of the Hebrew Bible sat down to write. And they weren't ignoring it. Dr. Christopher Hays is...

Two swords forged in the land of the Philistines. Two kings. One throne. And a literary motif so intricate that scholars have been misreading it for generations. The death of King Saul at Mount Gilboa is one of the most dramatic moments in the Old Testament. But what most people don't realize is that a misinterpretation of the archaeological evidence at Beth Shean has distorted how scholars unders...

What do we actually know about Jesus’ childhood? Not much. The canonical Gospels say surprisingly little about the birth and early life of Jesus. Matthew gives us only a few verses about the Magi. Luke tells us about the manger and one story of Jesus at the temple at age twelve. After that, the story goes silent. But early Christians were not satisfied with the silence. In the centuries after the...

The Old Testament was not written in a vacuum. It was written inside a world. A world of clay tablets and cuneiform, flood epics and creation myths, law codes carved into stone centuries before Moses climbed the mountain. Dr. Joshua Bowen has spent his career decoding that world. And what he found does not diminish Scripture. It puts it in focus. Dr. Bowen holds a Ph. D. in Assyriology from Johns...

Melchizedek appears just three times in the entire Bible. Twice in the Hebrew Bible. Once in the New Testament. And yet entire priesthoods, theological systems, and centuries of Christian doctrine have been built on top of this one figure. So who was he really? And what if the text was changed to hide his true identity? Dr. Robert Cargill, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa,...

The Hebrew poets didn't write safe words. They stacked image on top of image, layered metaphor on metaphor, and built texts designed to hit you in the chest. But when those words crossed into English, something got lost. The raw emotional power. The vivid word pictures. The sounds, the rhythms, the physicality of a language that was built to be felt, not just read. In this episode, Dr. Alison Gray...

What if almost everything you were taught about Old Testament purity laws was wrong? Most Christians hear "impurity" and immediately think sin. We've been taught that the purity system was about moral failure, that sacrifice was primitive and empty, and that Jesus came to sweep the whole oppressive thing away. Dr. Jonathan Klawans, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Boston University, say...

The Book of Revelation is one of the most debated, most misunderstood, and most avoided books in the entire Bible. But what if the key to unlocking it has been sitting in your Bible the whole time? In this episode of The Dig In Podcast, Johnny Ova sits down with Dr. Greg Beale, one of the most influential New Testament scholars in the world and the author of the legendary 1,300-page NIGTC commenta...

Rome didn't just conquer Israel. It tried to become Israel. In this episode of the Dig In Podcast, I sit down with Dr. Katell Berthelot, one of the world's leading scholars on Jewish-Roman relations and winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her groundbreaking work Jews and Their Roman Rivals. What she reveals in this conversation will reshape the way you think about the ancient world, the B...

She is Jewish. She belongs to an Orthodox synagogue. She does not believe Jesus is the Messiah. And yet, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine became the first Jewish person in history to teach New Testament at the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. She has met Pope Francis on three separate occasions. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And she has spent her entire care...

What did the world of Jesus actually look like? Not the sanitized version from paintings and Hollywood films, but the real, physical, tangible reality of first century Jewish life. Dr. Jodi Magness has spent decades digging through the soil of the Holy Land, and what she's uncovered reshapes how we understand the Gospels. From the foods Jesus likely ate to the massive ritual baths where pilgrims p...

He started growing tropical flowers in the Netherlands. Then he walked away from it all to chase a lifelong obsession with the Bible. Dr. Dirk Jongkind is the Academic Vice Principal at Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, and the lead editor behind the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, the first completely new critical edition of the Greek New Testament in over 40 years. He holds a PhD from Camb...

YouTube Description A Bedouin shepherd throws a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea in 1947. He hears something shatter. Days later, he climbs inside and discovers scrolls that would change biblical scholarship forever. Among those scrolls: 11 copies of 1 Enoch. More than most books of the Hebrew Bible found at Qumran. This wasn't fringe literature. This was a book that shaped how ancient Jews unde...

Buried in the writings of a first-century Jewish philosopher is a description of a community that most Christians have never heard of. A group of men and women living on the outskirts of Alexandria, Egypt who abandoned everything, their wealth, their status, their former lives, to pursue one thing: a vision of God's light. They were called the Therapeutae. And the women among them, known as the Th...

Imagine hearing that the Messiah had arrived... and then finding out he was executed by Rome. For first-century Jews, this wasn't just disappointing. It was disconfirming evidence. It made zero sense. They were waiting for a warrior king who would smash the heads of Israel's enemies and restore David's throne. Instead, they got a crucified rabbi from Nazareth. So how did Christianity even get off...

She's taught at Princeton for over two decades. She served as president of the largest professional organization of biblical scholars on the planet. The British Academy awarded her the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies, an honor rarely given to American scholars. She has spent over 40 years studying the Apostle Paul. And after all of that, Dr. Beverly Gaventa says most of us are reading Paul comp...

What if the way you've been reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John your entire life has caused you to miss the point? Dr. Jeannine Brown, David Price Professor of Biblical and Theological Foundations at Bethel Seminary and member of the NIV Committee on Bible Translation, joins the show to challenge everything you thought you knew about studying the Gospels. After 25+ years training pastors and tra...

What if everything you thought you knew about how Jesus read the Bible was incomplete? In this eye-opening conversation, we sit down with Dr. Bruce Chilton, the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College and the first scholar to write a critical commentary on the Aramaic Isaiah Targum. Dr. Chilton reveals a hidden world that most Christians have never encountered—the Aramaic Targum...

Skeptics said synagogues didn't exist in Galilee during Jesus' lifetime. They were wrong. They said crucified victims were never buried. They were wrong. They said the Gospel writers invented details about first-century Palestine. Wrong again. Dr. Craig Evans, one of the world's leading scholars on the historical Jesus and New Testament archaeology, has spent decades connecting physical discoverie...

What if the women of the early church weren't silent observers but powerful leaders, patrons, and apostles whose stories have been hidden for 2,000 years? In this groundbreaking episode, Dr. Lynn Cohick, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Houston Christian University and author of "Women in the World of the Earliest Christians," reveals how archaeological evidence, ancient inscriptions, a...

What happens when a biblical scholar with degrees from Oxford and Exeter decides to take on misinformation where it lives... on TikTok? Dr. Dan McClellan has built a following of nearly one million people by doing something radical: telling the truth about what the Bible actually says. In this conversation, Dr. McClellan takes us on his journey from serving as an LDS missionary in Uruguay, to gett...

Everything we thought we knew about women in the Bible was shaped by centuries of erasure. In this groundbreaking episode, I sit down with Professor Tal Ilan, one of the world's leading historians on Jewish women in late antiquity, to uncover the real lives of women in the first century. From synagogue leaders to economic powerhouses, from temple participation to early Christian leadership, Prof....

Mary is the best known, least known woman in history. Billions recognize her name, yet the actual Jewish woman behind the icons has been almost completely erased. In this powerful conversation, Dr. James Tabor, Distinguished Fellow at Hebrew University and two-time New York Times bestselling author, reveals what 20 years of research, archaeology, and critical scholarship have uncovered about the r...

For over 50 years, Dr. Kent Hovind has been one of the most fearless defenders of biblical creation. A former high school science teacher turned full-time evangelist, Dr. Hovind has debated over 390 atheists and evolutionists at universities across America. His famous creation seminar series has been translated into more than 40 languages and has impacted millions of believers around the world. He...